Circling back: 3 artists on the nostalgia economy
Vistas onto the weird business of repackaging the past at Frieze LA 2026
Kelly Wall, detail from Everything Must Go (2026)
Welcome back to The Gray Market! In today’s edition, I enlist some of the artists featured in the freshly opened Frieze Los Angeles to help me make sense of the big business of cultural nostalgia.
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American culture is drowning in nostalgia. From politics to pop culture, a motley crew of leaders and tastemakers are working like hell to market an idealized past that, in many cases, never existed in the first place. Combined with humanity’s natural tendency to romanticize the way things used to be, this campaign has turned nostalgia into a massive business opportunity across multiple sectors of the economy.
So it’s no surprise that the conflicts and consequences of this approach are being interrogated at the latest edition of Frieze Los Angeles. In today’s newsletter, I’m spotlighting three artists with works in and around the fair who are focused on particular expressions of this retro impulse. Together, their perspectives pinpoint some of the fault lines snaking through culture as so many of the creators and consumers alike just can’t stop looking backward.
For context, the notion of nostalgia has guided people’s perceptions for millennia. The word itself was coined in the late 17th century—weirdly, as a Greek-derived medical portmanteau to describe the homesickness of soldiers fighting abroad.1 But cultures as widespread as the Sumerians, the ancient Greeks, and the original followers of Confucius had been lamenting the disappearance of a supposedly ideal age since before the common era began.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early ‘80s, however, that for-profit companies began leveraging nostalgia as a strategy. (Yes, this is another thing that it’s fair to pin on the boomers.) Experts have argued that the American sociologist Fred Davis’s 1979 book Yearning for Yesterday inadvertently became the source code, and the commercial program has only gotten more robust and refined in the decades since. By the early ‘90s, you start getting academic research with titles like “Nostalgia and Consumption Preferences.” A decade or two later, going retro has become almost universally acknowledged as a safeguard against downside risk for all kinds of products and intellectual property. No wonder the compulsion to look backward now feels inescapable, especially in media.
From cover to cover
The opening of Kelly Wall’s Everything Must Go (2026). Photo by @ lili_peper
As a case in point, consider the strange double life of print magazines and newspapers. There’s no questioning the formats’ dual decline as mainstream sources of news and entertainment. Ad revenue among US print magazines is estimated to have plunged almost -60% over the past nine years, from around $10bn in 2017 to around $4.3bn in 2025, per data by Statista. The dive has been just about as steep for American newspapers, whose projected ad sales went from roughly $10.3bn to less than $5bn over the same span.
And yet, physical media enthusiasts point to a quasi-renaissance. “While mass market magazines are suffering,” wrote Chloe Mac Donnell in The Guardian in March 2025, “luxury and indie titles are flourishing.” Her focus was the relaunch of i-D, the once-hot youth culture mag from Vice Media (which filed for bankruptcy in 2023). But the list of canonical monthly page turners with a new lease on life includes Sports Illustrated, Ebony, Complex, Saveur, and Nylon.
This is where LA-based sculptor Kelly Wall comes in. Wall’s contribution to Frieze LA and the Art Production Fund’s slate of commissioned projects is Everything Must Go (2026), an installation playing on the twilight of physical magazines and newspapers. Its main venue is a defunct newsstand in Westwood Village, a stone’s throw from the Hammer Museum (where Wall’s work is included in the latest Made in LA biennial) and around 20 minutes from Santa Monica Airport on a good traffic day.2
Wall has transformed the newsstand into a giant light box and stocked its shelves with 136 individual glass sculptures. Each one includes a burst of wistful or tongue-in-cheek text overlaid on the smeared beauty of an LA sunset. The fonts, typefaces, and dimensions were all informed by those of actual physical publications.
“As our world has transitioned to digital versions of everything, physical ephemera is being lost,” Wall told me by phone outside the fair. What seem like little things—ticket stubs, album covers, photos clipped out of magazines—also quietly function as “memory keepers” whose importance often isn’t recognized until they’re gone.
Aside from the 15 pieces she’ll will give away free, the works are available for $300 a pop during the installation’s three nightly operating hours (5pm-8pm) while supplies last. Wall is wrapping them herself for buyers to take home immediately, inching the newsstand a little closer back to eerie vacancy with every sale. Commerce brings it back to life, then shuts it down again. To Wall, the give and take is emblematic.
“It’s cool that we have access to all these different sources because more people get to have their voices heard than when we were in a monoculture,” she said. “But also, there’s now so much going on that it’s harder to relate to people. Somebody will talk about a TV show they’re watching and you’re like, ‘I’ve never even heard of this!’”
“I’m also thinking about how there’s honestly a crescendo of endings happening in our world right now,” she added. “Even true news, not bought news, because all the people who own these newspapers are bought off. Free media feels like it’s coming to an end.”
The aforementioned resurgence of print magazines doesn’t provide as much pushback to this feeling as you might think. Many of them function first and foremost “as a marketing tool and potential advertising opportunity amid an otherwise grim digital ad outlook for publishers,” Kerry Flynn and Sara Fischer wrote at Axios. The resuscitated magazines in question tend to publish (way, way) less often than they did in their halcyon days; i-D and Nylon, for instance, are each only printing two issues a year now.
Wall, who said she grew up cutting up magazines, is resisting the doomer impulse while still recognizing that the change means something. “I’m not trying to say it was better back then. I don’t think that’s the case. There’s strengths to the way things are now,” she said. “But we’re also losing things.”
The Hollywood rewind
Andrew J. Park, Jacob’s Ladder (2026). Photo: Brendan Jaks, courtesy Anthony Gallery
A similar dynamic has been playing out in film and TV. The annual number of movie tickets sold in the US peaked in 2002, at around 1.6 billion, and swooned to around 771 million in 2024, per cinema analytics platform The Numbers. A modest post-pandemic bounceback in theater-going hit the ceiling in 2023, with most analysts expecting the steady drop to resume this year.
How does Hollywood’s backward glance factor in? On the one hand, of Box Office Mojo’s top 30 blockbusters by worldwide gross, only three were original IP: Avatar (#1), Titanic (#4), and Frozen (#26). The rest were all sequels, reboots, or adaptations of pre-existing hits in other media (see: Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie).3 On the other hand, although the average sequel tends to do better than the average original feature, full-on remakes of classic films tend to underwhelm commercial expectations, according to research led by the academic Abraham Ravid.
These findings shine a light on the double-edged sword of cinematic nostalgia, but the LA-based artist Andrew J. Park uses it to make a larger point about the dangers of buying into an idealized past. Park, who was born in 1996, doesn’t just reference the content of major ‘90s movies in his new airbrushed paintings in Anthony Gallery’s booth at Frieze; he also leverages the glitches and vulnerabilities of ‘90s VHS viewings to explore the unreliability of memory. His images bend and waver, get interrupted by bands of discoloration or static, and take on the soft focus wrought by tape decay. The signs of physical rot stand in for our cognitive, if not cultural, corrosion.
After painting variations on this theme since 2021, Park has evolved his approach for the latest works. As recently as 2024 he was still sometimes just glitching out recognizable screen captures from world-conquering anime like Dragon Ball Z or video games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time. Now he seems to be building his compositions on imagined visuals modeled on the aesthetic cues that dominated popular movies and TV shows three decades ago—all while relegating his overt references into his titles, like Stargate (2026) and Jacob’s Ladder (2026).
Another noteworthy evolution is that Park has begun using chatbots to create some of his source material. “I like the idea of combining cutting-edge AI image generation with older technologies like CRT TV screens and the airbrush,” he told me by email. “It gives the paintings a sense of anachronism—images that look like they’re on an old TV but are actually created using up-to-date AI models.”
Park’s read is that ChatGPT et al are already affecting our collective memory. Whether personally or culturally, our understanding of what actually happened was inherently shaky even before we could prompt an algorithm to manifest any nugget of media we want in a matter of seconds. Now that we have this power, the uncertainty amplifies. Like Wall, however, Park has mixed feelings about this update.
“I don’t know if it’s entirely negative in and of itself, but I see it as another technological leap, like the creation of the internet or even something as foundational as the invention of the wheel,” he said. “It ultimately depends on who controls it, and that’s the scariest part of what’s happening with AI right now.”
Throwing the car in reverse
Works by Y. Malik Jalal. Courtesy Murmurs
The business of nostalgia stretches beyond media onto the freeways in and outside of LA. From luxury SUVs to sports cars, retro stylings are a design priority for new auto models and a consistent draw in vintage collector cars. But the key reference points for both categories are now hovering along the same timeline as the classic films that inform Park’s paintings. For instance, the average manufacture date of a collector car is now 1989, per data from auto analytics firm Hagerty.
Although four-wheeled nostalgia is on the artist Y. Malik Jalal’s mind, troubling the commodification of retro cars isn’t really what he’s up to in his solo presentation with the LA gallery Murmurs. Instead, Jalal expanded a body of work in which he combines forged metal, auto parts sourced from scrapyards, and photos offered on online auction sites like eBay. Both of the latter types of components come from what Jalal has called “an economy of loss,” meaning the market for used goods created by obsolescence, financial need, death, and other downers that force people to do things like clear out storage units or take pennies on the dollar for the raw materials that once made up functional objects.
The new pieces embed cropped photos by, and of, anonymous strangers inside shaped metal frames. Sometimes Jalal affixes these setups to rubber floor mats still caked with debris from their long-gone drivers and passengers; other times he leaves them as standalone, wall-mounted objects. In either arrangement, the works look and feel something like modern reliquaries for Black Americans and the vehicles that gave them at least some limited sense of liberty—even they know the risks of getting behind the wheel in a country where law enforcement regularly harasses, arrests, or kills drivers (especially drivers of color) in broad daylight.
Gabrielle Datau, the director of programming at Murmurs, sees each of Jalal’s pieces in the booth “as a site of memory—preserving archives and expanding conversations around Black American history. The car becomes a metaphor for power, intimacy, and freedom. In this way, nostalgia isn’t about idealizing the past, it’s about examining the surfaces that held it.”
In other words, this really was how things were for certain people we will never know: moments that may or may not live on in their heads while their material residue has, for one reason or another, quite literally become trash. In this sense, Jalal is engaging with the past and its commodification in a fundamentally different way than Wall or Park. The romance takes a backseat to reality.
Still, all three artists see something knotty and consequential in the tendency of American culture—and, to some extent, American business—to obsessively reach backward. Looking through their eyes obviously won’t prevent the past from being endlessly replayed, repackaged, and resold to us. But at least their work can help us more crisply visualize what we’re losing and gaining in the bargain.
Wikipedia, which increasingly feels like our last great repository of edited knowledge, describes the origin like this: “The word nostalgia is a neoclassical compound derived from Greek, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), a Homeric word meaning ‘homecoming,’ and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning ‘pain’.”
There is also what Wall called an “anchor” to the main installation at the fair itself: three old school newspaper dispensers whose plexiglass windows have been replaced by her sunset glass sculptures.
For clarity, this is the 2023 computer-animated Mario Bros. movie, not the batshit 1993 live action adaptation starring Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa.